In July 2010 at the IFTR World Congress held in Munich, I sat listening to Helen Gilbert's keynote address: ‘Making Modernity: Indigenous Theatre and Salvage Ethnography’. Aside from the insightful specificities of Gilbert's topic, I was taken immediately by her methodological approach, which involved sifting back through reflections gained from postcolonial cultural studies, sharing the impulse of this work to look at cultures through a transversal lens and to posit their folding together through space and time, this with a view, for example, to challenging received ideas of indigenous cultures as traditional, the West as modern, and so forth. Broadly speaking, both the paper and the Q & A that followed it offered a timely and salutary reminder of how knowledge generation is often a sedimentary process: over time certain ideas get deposited and are endlessly mined; others get washed away or eroded. Moreover, this also means that we can find ourselves digging the same old theoretical spaces without looking at the local sites of theatre, performance or culture in ways that might persuade us to excavate elsewhere with different tools and methods. In brief, critical strategies, such as Gilbert's, that variously encourage us to revisit, rethink, rearrange, reconceptualize or recover are important strategies to keep in mind as means to renew and progress our contributions to bodies of theatre and performance knowledge.

This is my final issue for Theatre Research International. Handing over to Charlotte Canning as Senior Editor and Paul Rae as Assistant Editor, I want to wish them every future success with the journal. At the same time, I would like to thank everyone involved in the journal over the last three years, from those who submitted articles to those who contributed invaluable, behind-the-scenes labour – the editorial board, books-reviewing team and peer reviewers. A special thanks to Cambridge University Press for the assistance they provided with all aspects of the production process – especially to James Carr who has overseen each and every issue during my term of office. Leaving the editorship of the journal, I am pleased to note its buoyant subscription and submission rates – its revenue, despite the global, economic recession, continues to rise, while the number of articles offered for review has doubled over the course of the last three years.

Aesthetics. Politics. The Public Sphere. These emerge as connective headlines in this edition of TRI. Taken as a whole, the articles provoke key critical questions about the choice of aesthetics in relation to the potentiality of theatre's transformative capacities, and also about how the possibilities (and limitations) of the transformational power that theatre is commonly deemed to be capable of are conditioned by the kind of role theatre and performance have or are permitted to have in the public sphere.

This article focuses on Arna's Children, a 2004 documentary about the children's activities and theatre group founded in 1989 by Israeli activist Arna Mer Khamis in the Jenin Refugee Camp of the occupied West Bank. While the documentary provides an in-depth look at how theatrical practices can prove restorative in the face of destruction, my discussion suggests that its portrayal of the aesthetic medium also interrogates the limits of the relationship between theatrical practice and emancipatory ideals.

In my book Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford University Press, 2010) I analysed four encounters between philosophers and theatre people – the thespians in the title – as a point of departure for presenting a typology based on the exploration of the complex border landscapes between the discursive practices of philosophy and performance/theatre. In this article, I take a closer look at one of these encounters, exploring the narrative strategies of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, as well as Franz Kafka, suggesting that they can be analysed on the basis of the games of chess and go. The differences between the rules of these two board games serve as the basis for a dramaturgical analysis where different aspects of performance/theatre and philosophy (practice and theory) are brought together. This hermeneutic ‘approach’ also reflects the basic pedagogic situation of studying and researching theatre and performance as well as many of the ethical concerns raised by our involvement with these artistic practices, along with those of philosophy.

This article argues that the theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio constructs a meta-affective practice of spectatorship that engages with an ethics and politics of contemporary cultural memory. The promise of theatrical meta-affect can be found in the ontological surprise or rupture that enables feelings, if we understand them as the embodied archival trace of an affect, to be re-felt. In crafting an inversion of the mechanics of representation, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio generate a particular affective dimension that remediates the function of affect as it works to empathically bind spectator subjectivities through relations of power to images of suffering others. This generates a form of spectatorship that hurts: morally, emotionally and physically.

Contemporary theatricalized refugee narratives are often understood to communicate the profound trauma associated with forced displacement, even as this trauma is made ‘meaningful’ or ‘recognizable’ to audiences by the identification, however nebulous, of hope. This article examines some of the ways in which an affective dialectic of victimhood and hope functions in Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking (2006–), a small-scale international touring work directed by Mark Fleishman and produced by Cape Town-based Magnet Theatre. Paying attention to questions of narrative and performative form, I investigate how, and for whom, victimhood and hope function in and through the work, constructing its emotional and political tensions. I trace some of the conditions of its circulation, with particular emphasis on its transnational work with respect to a metropolitan audience at London's Oval House Theatre in 2010. In this, my purpose is to probe the question of who is served (as well as who is implicated and mobilized) by refugee narratives that may occupy all too easily a generalized geopolitical imaginary: ‘far from here’.

This article begins from the premise that a ‘critical turning point’ has been reached in terms of the relationship between performance and philosophy. Theatre and performance scholars are becoming increasingly engaged in philosophical discourse and there are growing amounts of work that take philosophy – from the work of Plato to Heidegger and Deleuze – as their guiding methodology for performance analysis. However, this article argues that we need to go further in questioning how we use philosophy in relation to performance, and that theatre and performance scholarship should attempt to go beyond merely applying philosophical concepts to performance ‘examples’. One way to do this, the article suggests, is by questioning the very distinction between performance and philosophy, for instance by exploring the idea of performance as philosophy. The article concludes by drawing from the work of figures such as Allan Kaprow, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle and John Mullarkey to argue that philosophers and performance scholars alike might extend their conception of what counts as thinking to include not only activities like performance, but embodied experiences and material processes of all kinds.

This article considers what might be implied in the term ‘immersive theatre’, asking what kinds of ‘interior’ audiences are invited to become immersed in. To facilitate my argument I draw on performances by two London-based theatre companies, Shunt and Punchdrunk, as examples of immersive theatre which use architectural interiors: extensive environments which audiences explore in order to find the performance, and sometimes to give performances themselves. I begin with a description of how these physical interiors and the audience member's movement through them becomes part of the dramaturgy of the work, before moving on to a critique of the term ‘immersive’. This critique is initially based on analysis of its metaphorical character, using an approach derived from cognitive linguistics, and is developed through Josephine Machon's (syn)aesthetics and Heidegger's phenomenological aesthetics.

Despite the stylish blend of multimedia and live performance in Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon, touring in 2010 and 2011, critics are surprised by the reappearance of the archetypal love story in the space of contemporary intermedial performance. This article argues that the performance, set in contemporary Shanghai, explores the lived experience of transience and mobility through a narrative in which individual lives are implicated in a transnational, transcultural and transgenerational romance. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's work on liquid modernity and liquid love, we argue that the performance grapples with the experience of being unbound and disconnected in a liquid world.

This article explores the notion of participation in contemporary theatre and performance on two levels, namely how participation is shaped within performance, and how performance participates in the public sphere. Using recent examples from Sudan, Russia and Lebanon/Netherlands, I investigate how the political premises underlying the call for participation are reimagined aesthetically, and, conversely, how artistic strategies of shaping audience participation render visible the failures and possibilities of people's participation in the public sphere. The connection between these two dimensions of participation is made by engaging the concepts of ‘representation’, ‘collectivity’ and ‘theatricality’, which I call ‘vectors of participation’. I discuss how the artistic representation of an idea is complementary to political representation, how the demand for collective participation in the public sphere transforms into collective creation in the artistic sphere, and how theatricality in spectatorship is linked to the political call to bear witness.

This article considers the proposition that performance as research is a series of embodied repetitions in time, on both micro (bodies, movements, sounds, improvisations, moments) and macro (events, productions, projects, installations) levels, in search of a series of differences. It investigates the proposition in terms of Bergson's notion of ‘creative evolution’ and Deleuze's engagement with it, and is concerned with questions such as: what nature of differences does performance as research give rise to? Where do the differences lie, in the repetitions or in the spaces in between? And is there a point at which the unleashing of differences is exhausted, a point at which, perhaps, the evolution becomes an involution, either a shrinkage of difference, an inverted return to the same, or, in the Deleuzian sense, a new production no longer dependent on differentiation but on transversal modes of becoming?

This article focuses on an incident of censorship and police intervention at the Königstädtische Theater in Berlin in 1828, occasioned by a performance of Gotthilf August von Maltitz's The Old Student (Der alte Student). Identifying how the playwright and his actors sought to represent political topics onstage allows me to explore how theatre functioned as a potential player in an incipient public sphere. In turn this reveals how the desire to represent political topics onstage and to become a performative player in the public sphere was already under way in the 1820s, well before the revolutionary turbulence of 1848.

This article re-examines the legacy of modernist aesthetics, with special focus on Samuel Beckett and his radical critique of subjectivity, language and ontology. The problem of language as a fundamental agent of difference pervades both the content and form of literary modernism. Beyond conventional semantic and aesthetic function, language acts in Beckett's works to construct a subject that is at once multiple in expression and voided at its core. Drawing on performance and philosophy to explore an ethical dimension of Beckett's praxis already sensed by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou, this study recalls the political implications of what are sometimes dismissed as ‘mere’ aesthetic questions, by looking deeper into the modernist attitude toward language, subjectivity, and void. This research suggests that the full radicality of the Beckettian subject has yet to be fully absorbed in philosophy and culture, devastating as it is to the postmodern focus on identity and difference.

This article is concerned with an extraordinary artwork created by a young Swedish art student, Anna Odell. Odell's re-enactment of an earlier suicide attempt on a bridge in Stockholm, filmed for an art installation, caused an outcry from the public and medical authorities and a court case that stimulated heated debate in the national press. Here I examine Odell's work for the ‘critical’ questions it in turn provokes about artistic creation and communication: the difficulties for the performance scholar in addressing the enactment when it is so generically hard to define; why the art/artist was found guilty of a ‘fraudulent practice’; and what might be revealed and further problematized by theorizing the enactment as a cultural, socio-political event.

This dossier documents a research collaboration between members of the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, and members of the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom, between 2008 and 2010. This collaboration was dedicated to a cross-cultural inquiry into methods and topics of performance research that might serve to produce a robust international dialogue capable of approaching performance through multinational lines of inquiry. Participants chose a common topic (History, Memory, Event, and the Politics of Performance 1970–1990), and composed an archive of materials drawn from six nations which was analysed and interrogated by the group. The dossier offers examples from the archive and an account of the way the group processed these artefacts.

This article examines an early example of martial arts performance in Australia occasioned by the tour of – purportedly – the first team of sumo wrestlers to leave Japan. By examining the performances and reception of the Japanese sumo wrestlers against the backdrop of international political relations, which included the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, this study contributes to our understanding of the transnational circulation of the martial arts on popular stages, and to our understanding of the circus as a politically dynamic site that nurtured performative transnational encounters. The case of the sumo wrestlers reveals, furthermore, ways in which the popular stage of the circus worked to undermine negative racial stereotypes prevalent in Australia's homeland culture.

This article addresses the relative absence of class-based analysis in theatre and performance studies, and suggests the reconfiguration of class as performance rather than as it is traditionally conceived as an identity predicated solely on economic stratification. It engages with the occlusion of class by the ascendancy of identity politics based on race, gender and sexuality and its attendant theoretical counterparts in deconstruction and post-structuralism, which became axiomatic as they displaced earlier methodologies to become hegemonic in the arts and humanities. The article proceeds to an assessment of the development of sociological approaches to theatre, particularly the legacy of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. The argument concludes with the application of an approach which reconfigures class as performance to the production of Declan Hughes's play Shiver of 2003, which dramatizes the consequences of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s for ambitious members of the Irish middle class.